Notes and Errata: September 3rd, 2010

-I really enjoyed this Slate article, which uses Kevin Durant as a jumping-off point into how we project things onto athletes. The important takeaway is that it isn’t really all that important whether Durant is or isn’t all the good things people say about him (I think he is): it’s that we’ve been down this road before, whether it was Tiger Woods or LeBron James or Alex Rodriguez or Pete freaking Rose. And it’s fine to praise Durant for doing everything right, which he has. It’s when we get into “this guy should be more like THAT guy!” when things get dangerous, because what we’re really saying is “this guy should appear to be more like THAT guy!”

I mean, if LeBron’s “I don’t want to go ring-chasing. I want to stay with the Cavs and build a championship” quote from a 2006 interview came right after another high-profile player left his team to go chase rings, he’d have been lionized for it, right?

-You’ve gotta love FIBA time, if only because you can get headlines like “Lethargic U.S. team dominates.”

-Eric Gordon with a monster game for team USA — is it wrong to have hope for the Clippers? Probably, right?

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Nate Smith is an Associate Editor. He grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and moved to NE Ohio in 2000. He adopted the Cavs in 2003 and graduated from Kent State in 2009 with a BA in English. He can be contacted at oldseaminer@gmail.com or @oldseaminer on Twitter.

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